If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

I got it and played some 3 hours and i can say it surprised me, in a good way. The controls feel a tad weird at the beginning (basically you have a mobile crosshair, that when moved past a certan point will make your ship steer inthat direction) but grew on me really fast, and soon i was pulling off some neat moves grazing structures while gunning (or trying to) other vectors down. This is further improved by the 2 flight modes, one goes like jet, and the other hovers, and it'spossible to switch between the 2 at will and instantly, allowing for inrcedibly tight manouvering and 180s and so on.

Shooting feels good. Projectiles have travel time so learning how to lead targets (not easy having to deal with the Z axis too and often having just the sky ias your target's background) and predicting moves is of the essence, as is evasive manouvering.

There might be not many players in this game yet, but damn are the dedicated.
I'm actually looking forward to the 28th February update, it will definately make the game worth it's $25 pricetag which hopefully will be brought back down to $20 to make it a no brainer.

As for the weapons, all of them have a certain degree of difficulty.

It's easier to be become effective with using dual Homing and Swarm, then it is with the other more skilled based weapons. But there's a point in the skill curve where the skill based weapons just plain out perform those "noob" weapons.

It's actually a surprisingly well balanced game, I might not stand a chance going against other skilled players with a rocket/plasma or gattling, but I can at least go against them with a homing and swarm (to a small degree).

I don't get it? He's just pointing the reticule in the general direction of the enemy player and spamming, and somehow it's hitting them? The heck is this? Homing missiles? If all it takes to hit someone is to put a tiny dot within a giant circle that's not very skilful...

I don't get it? He's just pointing the reticule in the general direction of the enemy player and spamming, and somehow it's hitting them? The heck is this? Homing missiles? If all it takes to hit someone is to put a tiny dot within a giant circle that's not very skilful...

You're looking at it from a FPS perspective. Think Descent/Freespace level of six degrees of movement freedom. That's how Strike Vector controls. Now apply that to the speed shown in the video above - rockets are dumb fire btw, not homing - and every time you see the camera suddenly jerk in and/or he stops for a split second? That's him switching to hover mode just long enough to aim+turn+fire --> switch back to jet mode --> acquire another target --> repeat.

Basically, every time you hear that KER-CHUNK sound is him switching back and forth between hover/jet mode. Its that instantaneous.

Of particular note is him using hover mode so that he stops virtually dead still to pick up power-ups resting on scenery and then immediately moving on. Especially on the few occasions he's flying close to the walls. What this video can't accurately convey is the sheer speed of your machine in jet mode - its very much a KERSPLAT level of speed. Rest assured he's displaying a very good level of skill here.

You're looking at it from a FPS perspective. Think Descent/Freespace level of six degrees of movement freedom. That's how Strike Vector controls. Now apply that to the speed shown in the video above - rockets are dumb fire btw, not homing - and every time you see the camera suddenly jerk in and/or he stops for a split second? That's him switching to hover mode just long enough to aim+turn+fire --> switch back to jet mode --> acquire another target --> repeat.

Basically, every time you hear that KER-CHUNK sound is him switching back and forth between hover/jet mode. Its that instantaneous.

Of particular note is him using hover mode so that he stops virtually dead still to pick up power-ups resting on scenery and then immediately moving on. Especially on the few occasions he's flying close to the walls. What this video can't accurately convey is the sheer speed of your machine in jet mode - its very much a KERSPLAT level of speed. Rest assured he's displaying a very good level of skill here.

All that is obvious from the video. What is not obvious is how he is getting kills. Like I said, all it looks like is him spamming rockets in the general direction of the enemy ship. None of them ever appear to actually hit the enemy ship, and yet he's getting kills.

Which would lead me to repeat myself:If all it takes to hit someone is to put a tiny dot within a giant circle that's not very skilful...

Beat this guy in a 1 Vs 1 and we'll talk again.

Rockets are projectile weapons, they have a certain speed attached to it, so you need to get within a specific range to use it effectively and you need to judge the movement of another Vector and it's distance at the time.

I think what your seeing is a combination of Netcode prediction, the fact that the explosive effect plays outwards, and just the plain speed of the game.
In most games you just get an explosion effect that plays from the center of the impact outwards, which causes the other half of the effect to play (which you can't see most of the time) to clip into the environment.

In SV, if you hit a moving target, the explosive cloud will remain for a few seconds, while the other vector goes into kamikazi mode with it's own cloud. That explosive cloud going outwards will make it look as if you hit the target earlier than you should have.
In UT3 hitting someone with a rocket gave a minor and quick explosion effect and when they died they just exploded on the source location. So there was no real "after cloud" effect.
It's quite deceptive on the eyes.

Take this kill for example:
As you can see the area where the rockets spawned and where the cursor is are currently not the same. But what happened here is the ship was turning, and in 1 or 2 frames earlier, the cursor was on the area where this player decided to fire the rockets. I could not even stop at those frames, that's how quickly the player reacted. Of course this would seem like a random kill out of nowhere to anyone who haven't reviewed it.

But the good news is, these are two of the top 10 players atm, so not everyone you find in SV have these type of reaction times.

[IMG]

You'll also find people like this on CStrike etc, but they mostly hidden by the vast amount of players playing the game, here they stand out like a sore thumb with such a small community.

Which would lead me to repeat myself:If all it takes to hit someone is to put a tiny dot within a giant circle that's not very skilful...

Well if you watch cpm22 bulgarian odyssey maybe, but those are rare frags. If you get to the real thing and give a look to a reppie vs bulat duel from quakeworld* they rarely hit each other, partly because unpredictable movement sends RL out of the function and partly because every pick up has its own value much like in chess so they just spam anywhere the opponent is heading to since there's geometry to splash the damage on. I think we can agree long and high rocket jumps are a bit more exploitable than Vectors movements.

*Also note that the rockets from quakeworld are overwhelming compared to rockets from other quake games.

Once you start getting the hang of movement and weapons, it's on, but those have a learning curve attached to them.
Some weapons like Gatling needs to be lead(luckily not effected by latency) depending on how fast and what direction a vector is moving. That doesn't have any assist apart from a visual on your cross-hair that plays when a bullet hits.

Other weapons like plasma just requires precision aiming, but two plasmas can instantly kill an enemy.

There are challenge maps that can help with the movement part a bit in the start.